Redeployment

Redeployment is a 2014 book of short stories written by veteran Phil Klay. Its grim humor and unflinching look at the brutality and horrors of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars won Klay the National Book Award for fiction. The twelve stories in the collection examine themes of maddening bureaucracy, camaraderie among Marines, the cost of civilian casualties to Iraqi society and to the soldiers who inflict them, the difficulty of transitioning back into civilian life, and more.

The stories each have a different first-person narrator. Most of the narrators are unnamed. The majority of the stories have overlapping themes, but the subjects and locations are different.

In the title story, a Marine who has returned home reminisces about shooting dogs in Iraq after he saw one lapping up the blood of a corpse. When he returns home, he finds that he and his wife are often uncomfortable around each other. His own dog has fallen sick and needs to be euthanized, but he decides to do it himself instead of allowing a stranger to kill his animal.

The story “Money As a Weapons System” plays almost as satire as it illustrates the bureaucracy a Civil Service engineer faces while trying to get a water plant working in Iraq. He is beset at each turn by incompetent or indifferent superiors, apathetic coworkers, hostile Iraqis, and the demands of a congressional representative back in the US. Eventually he is reduced to trying to start an initiative that will teach widows how to become beekeepers.

In “Prayer in the Furnace,” a chaplain finds himself facing a crisis of faith as he struggles to help a Marine deal with the hatred and rage he feels for all humanity as his time in Iraq grows longer. There seems to be no point to the war for the Americans or the Iraqis, and God seems indifferent to the struggles of each side.

“Psychological Operations” examines the aftermath of the war for a college student at Amherst. He is a Coptic Christian who is constantly mistaken for a Muslim because of his skin color. In Iraq, he worked as a propaganda specialist, helping broadcast incendiary messages through loudspeakers to lure Muslims out of mosques to fight the Marines. At Amherst, he is challenged by an idealistic, newly converted Muslim woman who condemns the American presence in the Middle East.

Each story shows a man trying to come to terms with his service, self-perceived cowardice, violent wartime acts, reintegration into society, and ambivalence about his role in the world after the war. Redeployment is a book about the toll that a war takes on those who fight it, on both sides, as well as those who await the soldiers back home.